Power line carrier for real time load management

Demand Side Management (DSM) is presently gaining momentum in nearly all the world. Lack of primary energy resources, lack of generation capacity, and the need to reduce emissions all combined together are pushing world utilities into exploring the extent DSM techniques can play in their favor. To that end, a cheap and reliable communication means is necessary to make DSM projects of a sound economic value. Power line communication (PLC) technology has a huge potential to become the favored communication technology for DSM, since there is no extra investment is put in dedicated communication cables. This paper presents a prototype for a DSM regime. The prototype is composed of a central station, which monitors different loads. Load data is collected at the load stations and sent back to the central station via PLC. The central station contains the DSM algorithm, whether peak limiting, load shifting, etc. Control signals are carried back to load stations. The prototype has been successfully experimented with dummy loads.